'Producers' co-author has old memories of Berlin

As a Berlin theater prepared to open its production of "The Producers," Mel Brooks, the actor, comedian and director behind the show, reminisced to The Associated Press about past visits to Germany and reflected on the symbolism of playing the Third Reich for laughs in the German capital.

Brooks, 82, was a U.S. army engineer in Germany for 3 1/2 months at the end of World War II, assigned tasks including tracing land mines and building bridges over streams.

"It was very dangerous," he recalled in a telephone interview. "Every once in a while we'd be so close to the Germans that they would sing something in German and I would pick up a megaphone loudspeaker and I would sing 'Toot Toot Tootsie Goodbye,' the Al Jolson song, and at the end of it I could actually hear applause. They liked my impression of it."

Visiting Berlin years later, he crossed the Berlin Wall through Checkpoint Charlie to the communist side of the city to see the theater where Bertolt Brecht staged his plays – "The stuff that I really cherish."

"I like Berlin, because Berlin has always been sophisticated," he said. "I like Hamburg a little bit. ... Munich for film festivals; they're pretty good when it comes to movies. ... I had a good time in Munich; you can get weissewurst and pretzels. And Berlin of course is a hotbed ... The smartest people in the world, the smartest artists and entertainers."

He says someone asked him whether it took courage to let "The Producers" be staged in Germany, "and I said, I'm not brave; the Germans are brave. The Berliners are brave. If there's any falling out, it's going to be amongst them. Americans just see it as two scoundrels trying to make a lot of money from a flop."

But for German audiences, "of course, center stage is going to be Hitler."